Radiation detectors may be used in a wide variety of applications. For example, radiation detectors may be used in radiation detector systems to capture images of objects. For example, diagnostic images of a person or an animal may be obtained to assist a doctor or other health care professional in making an accurate diagnosis, as well as for imaging luggage and shipping containers or for industrial inspection. Radiation detectors also may be used for non-imaging applications, such as for security detection and identification of radionuclides. In these non-imaging applications, the spectral response for the radiation detectors is used.
The radiation detectors may be, for example, pixelated radiation detectors, such as Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CZT) detectors, which are increasingly used. In these systems, the signal levels (e.g., the amount of signal generated by an x-ray event) from the detector are often extremely small and easily corrupted by digital activity within the system. For example, the digital communication links within the system can generate noise that interferes with the signals from the detectors. However, signals are needed for controlling the system, such as the state of the system, transitions between different operations, etc., for example, during data acquisition.
Additionally, the detected signals in these pixelated radiation detectors can induce transient crosstalk signals into neighboring pixels that affect the subsequent analysis of the radiation spectrum. For example, the transient crosstalk signals may cause a false hit (e.g., false photon hit) to be recorded. Moreover, because true and false hits cannot be distinguished after detection, these false hits are not accounted for in the subsequent signal processing. These incorrect counts (e.g., an incorrect number of photon counts) that are added to the relevant energies may cause significant image artifacts, thereby decreasing image quality and reducing the reliability of image acquisition results and any analysis of these images thereafter. Moreover, when detecting a spectral response, spectrum distortion caused by weighting potential crosstalk can also reduce the detector sensitivity and cause false alarms.